Do Hard: The Most Important Mentoring Tips For Women In Leadership

Much is written about how few women make it into the top leadership positions. The reasons are complex and multilayered, so there is much to write. But I consistently find several mentoring tips for women both maximally effective and minimally understood when I talk to women pursuing leadership positions: DO HARD.

On its face, this advice is pretty simple: stay in your stretch zone and learn to master feelings of uncertainty, discomfort and periodic failure while you learn and grow. This can be more challenging for some women than men, which is actually a dynamic that is written about often (e.g., imposter syndrome). But what’s less often explored is WHY it’s so important for women to overcome their culturally ingrained reservations about taking on big challenges, and how to do it authentically in our modern business culture.

The truth is that regardless of your gender, race, personality type or upbringing, leadership is hard. The leaders who are leading now, who are selecting their replacements for the future, are keen to spot talent that knows this, who takes on “hard” with enthusiasm, and who succeeds more often than not. A woman may have to overcome unconscious bias to be selected, but if she isn’t viewed as someone capable of “doing hard,” she’ll never get the shot at it at all.

So if you want into leadership, it’s never too early to take on “hard” and learn to succeed at it. This will look different at different points in your career, and the path is not always a straight line up the ladder. Below are the career development mentoring tips for women I never received, and which would have dramatically reshaped my own career and that of many other women I’ve helped along the way…

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